Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/47

Rh right action; condemns socialism as unscientific and totally incompatible with the continued progress of civilization, and again presents as his ideal of the social state, and as the form to which it is surely tending, something which it is difficult to distinguish from socialism; commiserates mankind for being involved in a perpetual struggle for existence, and yet looks forward joyfully to a condition of struggle which he says will be more "intense" than anything the past has witnessed. It is possible that Mr. Kidd sees some way in his own mind of bringing these apparently contradictory views into harmony; but the general impression left on a careful reader of his book will be that his literary art includes the supreme accomplishment, to speak metaphorically, of riding two horses at the same moment in opposite directions.

Unfortunately, all readers are not careful, and some are prejudiced. These are days in which the glib littérateur talks about "the bankruptcy of science"; and Mr. Kidd, though he does not use the phrase, has done not a little to give countenance to the silly idea. Science, he tells us, has made such a distressing bungle in its treatment of religion, shown such hopeless incompetency, such amazing blindness, in connection with the whole subject! Alas! why did not Mr. Kidd appear a little earlier upon the scene, in order to prevent this painful scandal? He is a man of science—at least, he discourses with the air of one—and it is too bad that "science" should have incurred all this discredit when help was so near at hand. One might be disposed to ask whether science has not redeemed its character through the discoveries of Mr. Kidd, were it not that the latter is evidently indisposed to let his work go to the credit of science. Achilles has come out of his tent and mingled in the fray; but he does not want his mighty deeds to swell the glory of the Grecian name; rather would he flout the Greeks for the sorry figure they cut before he intervened. But, if Mr. Kidd's achievements are not to be passed to the credit of science, to what account are they to be credited? "Alone I did it" is a proud boast, but still we may ask, in what character? What is science if it is not organized and correlated knowledge? If Mr. Kidd has really helped to organize and correlate our knowledge on the subject of religion he has done a good thing; but Science must really claim that by so doing he has extended her boundaries and added to her conquests. And so the historian of nineteenth-century thought will say, if, when the complete work of the century comes to be narrated and appraised, "Kidd on Social Evolution" shall have managed to escape Libitina.

Let us, however, examine with a little attention Mr. Kidd's alleged discoveries, and let us see how far, if at all, science has been at fault in the matter.